German Finance Minister Blames US for Financial Crisis

Wall Street will never be the same again, said Steinbrueck

DW-World.deDeutsche Welle

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck deemed the US banking crisis an "earthquake" that will cost the US its role as a superpower of the world financial system. He stressed that German banks can cope with losses.

"Wall Street and the world will never again be the way they were before the crisis," said Steinbrueck in a speech to the German parliament, the Bundestag, on Thursday, Sept. 25. Write-downs and write-offs of bad credit spawned by "a blind drive for double-digit profits" have so far totaled $550 billion and no end to the crisis is in sight, he added.

The world financial system will consequently become more "multi-polar," he predicted.

Steinbrueck told the Bundestag that the Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers would be meeting in Washington next month to discuss how to tighten regulation of capital markets.

The German federal government, meanwhile, would continue efforts to trim spending, but would also make some moves to stimulate the economy.

He reiterated Germany's refusal to set up its own bank bail-out scheme, saying the crisis was principally a US problem.

Irresponsible moves

Steinbrueck didn't pull his punches during the Bundestag speech

Reiterating Berlin's push for tighter regulation, Steinbrueck accused the US of blunders.

"The cause of the crisis was the irresponsible exaggeration of the principle of a free, unrestrained market," he told the Bundestag.

Washington has been reluctant to increase minimum equity rules and has too many competing regulators over US investment banks.

"This system, which in many ways is inadequately regulated, is now collapsing," he said, adding that Germany's banking system remained "relatively robust," with German regulators confident they can absorb losses.

"New rules of the road" for the financial markets were needed, he said.

Plans to be debated when the finance ministers of the G7 meet will include tightening cooperation between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Financial Stability Forum (FSF).

The agencies were created by western nations as an early warning system.

Strengthening cooperation

The German Landesbanken need to pull together

Steinbrueck also renewed his call for fusion across Germany's state bank sector. The country's big commercial lenders, the so-called "Landesbanken," have been hard hit by the financial crisis.

The next move needs to be made by the individual states, as co-owners of the leading state banks, said the Social Democrat minister: "They need to overcome regional political pride and embrace pan-regional co-operation."

This, he said, would strengthen the German banking system and boost its sustainability.

"Financial support from the government in mopping up problems in this sector should not be expected," he added.

Given that past attempts to fuse the "Landesbanken" have failed, Steinbrueck proposed a redefinition of their business models in order to avoid excessive risk and to increase returns.

The financial crisis has, however, shown that both savings banks and cooperative banking institutions are stable and reliable, said Steinbrueck. DW staff.

P.S.1’s Autumn Harvest, September 30th 2008

Public Farm 1 c/o P.S.1

Anyone who had a chance to make it out to P.S.1 this summer had to stop and be amazed at the monolithic future of urban farming aka Public Farm 1. Equal parts art/architecture installation and urban garden, Public Farm 1 was created by WORK Architecture Company as part of MoMA and P.S.1’s Young Architects Program. The project was unveiled in June and the unique structure was used to grow numerous plants, vegetables, and herbs.

Since autumn is now officially here, P.S.1 will celebrate the fruits of P.F.1’s labor with an Autumn Harvest on Sept. 30th. It’s open to the public with a limited number of tickets. Of course, there will be hors d’oeuvres served but even better will be the musical stylings of David Bruno. And if you can’t make it out, they’re streaming the show on their Art Radio broadcast here.

Rothko

On the occasion of Tate Modern's first Rothko retrospective in more than 20 years -- it seems a good opportunity for an extensive Rothko post. There are three links first one is to the Tate Modern's page for the show. There are two articles by Guardian's Jonathan Jones: one covering his visit to The Rothko Chapel, and second a fascinating article regarding the circumstances for The Seagram"s Murals eventual landing at Tate Modern. Stressing the importance of this show and the significance of the Murals.



You will also get a great utility developed by National Gallery of Art, Washington, which by the way houses the most extensive Rothko collection in the world. Plus a little flash slide show of my personal favorites.

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Ambushed by Rothko

He was one of the 20th century's greatest artists, whose hypnotic paintings grew darker and darker. Jonathan Jones travels to Texas to take in Mark Rothko's final, misunderstood masterpiece - a haunting chapel the artist never lived to see

• Jonathan Jones

Darkness dawns ... Rothko at work in 1961. Photograph: © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2008

'Can you see it?" says the man in the Hawaiian shirt, pointing up at the purple canvas towering over us. "I've never been here before," he says, his shirt standing out wildly in the cool grey of the octagonal concrete room. "But I saw it in a matter of minutes. Can you see the figure of Jesus Christ our Lord on the Cross?"

I look politely into the misty bloom of the gigantic abstract work. It contains no images whatsoever, Christian or otherwise. I mumble something noncommittal, and he goes around pointing out Christ to everyone else in the room. They soon leave. I walk around staring at one colossal rectangle of sombre colour after another. A student comes in and kneels before a vast triptych that people choose to see as an altarpiece.

This is the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Art surrounds you here. Paintings on a majestic scale dominate each of its eight walls. There is little to interrupt their power, just the bare plaster, a few benches, and a couple of cushions on the floor. There are doorways, but they don't lead anywhere, except into a tiny alcove containing nothing. Their presence simply adds to the eeriness of this place, illuminated only by a skylight that softens the fierce afternoon sun. I am here on a pilgrimage to the greatest marriage of art and architecture in the US. But is this journey about art - or religion? The Rothko Chapel was designed to house the paintings of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, but it is also a sacred space, a non-denominational place of worship.

The chapel houses one of the two greatest cycles of Rothko paintings. The other is at the Tate Modern in London. On February 25 1970 .....Read more



Feeding Fury

Mark Rothko was an unknown abstract expressionist when he won a plum commission - to provide paintings for New York's swankiest restaurant. So why did he pull out and give them to the Tate? Jonathan Jones investigates

• Jonathan Jones
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The Seagram murals at Tate Modern. Photo: David Sillitoe

Mark Rothko was found on the morning of February 25 1970, lying dead in a wine-dark sea of his own blood. He had cut very deep into his arms at the elbow, and the pool emanating from him on the floor of his studio measured 8ft x 6ft. That is, it was on the scale of his paintings. It was, to borrow the art critical language of the time, a colour field.

New York had a charge sheet a mile long by that time when it came to killing artists, especially painters of Rothko's generation - the abstract expressionists, the epic and baffling, rhetorical and silent, introspective and dazzling movement whose intensity and originality made Manhattan the capital of modernism in the middle of the 20th century. Suicide had already taken Arshile Gorky in 1948. Jackson Pollock was killed in a possibly suicidal drunken car crash in 1956. Another dubiously accidental car crash saw to the sculptor David Smith in 1965. Rothko looked like one of the survivors, and was even insidiously caricatured as a careerist, a bit of a fraud, who had turned the rigour and extremism of abstract expressionist painting into something luscious, colourful, decorative and profitable - until that morning in 1970.

Rothko's death changed everything. It transformed the meaning of his work, gave every encounter with his painting a terrible gravity. It fooled the cursory eye, putting Rothko's motivation so apparently on the surface, so visibly in the public domain, that it made it hard ever to think about him again with any subtlety.

His death also ensured that a puzzle at the heart of his painting would never be solved. For Rothko's contract with society was not torn up that day in 1970, but a decade earlier, in 1959. That was when Rothko suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York - the most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter, a tremendously lucrative and enviable chance to take his work to new heights of ambition.

Jackson Pollock had attained the freedom and grace of his dripped and flung paintings for just a few years, when he was newly married and off the bottle, until one day he started drinking again and was set on a spiral of destruction. Rothko's crisis over the Seagram murals was comparable. It was his finest moment, and yet also the end of his uneasy truce with success, happiness and America. Afterwards, his life and art unravelled - the life disastrously, the art with a terrible beauty, becoming ever more open in its dealings with death.

The enigma of Rothko's Four Seasons murals is especially urgent for us, the British art public, because we have accidentally ended up as Rothko's heirs. There are not many bona fide masterpieces of modern painting in Britain. Especially, we don't have many great paintings by the abstract expressionists - with a glorious exception. ..........Read More

US a step closer to Iran blockade

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The United States government has imposed new sanctions on Iran, this time targeting its shipping industry, by blacklisting the main shipping line and 18 subsidiaries, accusing the maritime carrier of being engaged in contraband nuclear material, a charge vehemently denied by Iran.

While the economic impact of the measures against Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) will be minimal in light of the near absence of any connection between the shipping company and US businesses, this latest US initiative against Iran sends a strong signal about the US's intention to escalate pressure on Iran, even unilaterally if need be. And, perhaps, it is a prelude for more serious and dangerous actions in the near future, above all a naval blockade of Iran to choke off its access to, among other things, imported fuel.

The outgoing George W Bush administration is slowly but surely taking strident actions that will effectively tie the hands of the next US president, particularly if that happens to be Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama, who in the past has expressed an interest in direct dialogue with Tehran.

Should the new sanctions prove as catalysts for more aggressive US actions against Iran in international waters or the Persian Gulf, as called for by some members of US Congress seeking the interdiction of Iranian cargo ships, then by the time Bush's successor takes over at the Oval Office next January, the climate in US-Iran hostility may have degenerated to such depths that it would take a monumental effort to undo what appears to be Bush's last hurrah.

On the other hand, on the eve of US presidential elections in November, more tensions between the US and Iran are tantamount to greater prioritization of national security issues by the average American voter, something that benefits Obama's Republican rival, "bomb, bomb Iran" John McCain.

Indeed, the coupling of crisis in Georgia and the Iran crisis represents a major bonus for McCain and his "get tough" approach toward the US's external foes.

According to American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has done several reports on US covert actions against Iran, Bush has on more than one occasion vowed not to leave the White House with Iran's nuclear program still intact.

Read full article on Asia Online

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his Wikipedia entry, click here.

Iranians for Obama

For Iranians and their friends. For democracy and progress in America... and Iran!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

WELCOME!

Dear friends,

We are promoting the candidacy of Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States.

We will face objections from two camps:

• The conservatives, who feel that any movement for peace between Iran and the United States implies a capitulation to the Islamic Republic. We believe the exact opposite is true: The American warmongers and neo-conservatives and the Islamic Republic's warmongers need and reenforce each other. Placing the relationship between these two countries on a rational basis will mean an opening up of Iranian society, as the rationale that Iran is under threat of Western aggression is taken out of reaction's arsenal.
  
• The leftists who believe that Obama is going to follow more or less the same war-mongering policies as Bush & Co. Although we have grave misgivings about much of what Obama says, we believe that an Obama presidency will mean a qualitative improvement in Iranian-American relations.
  

We look forward to a dialogue with those who disagree with us. We only ask them to respect عصمت قلم--the purity of the pen--and conduct themselves in a spirit of dialogue. Feelings run high on all sides, but we want to generate light and not heat.

Finally, the logo of our group is designed by Ostad Ali Reza Darvish. You are welcome to use the artwork to further Obama's candidacy or purchase buttons from us. Contact us at

Iranians4Obama@gmail.com.